Isis targets vulnerable Bosnia for recruitment and attack
High youth unemployment, ethnic
tensions and political paralysis help jihadis lure young people to Syria and
open up new terror front in heart of Europe
Islamic
State has expanded its
efforts to recruit fighters in Bosnia and incite terrorist attacks there,
taking advantage of the world’s highest youth unemployment rate and chronic
political paralysis.
The initiative,
though small in scale, is causing alarm in western capitals, where diplomats
fear that the mix of economic malaise and ethnic tensions represents fertile
terrain for extremism, and that Europe could come to regret the failure to
confront Bosnia’s profound structural problems in the two decades since the
war.
Isis produced a new recruitment
video this month,
targeting the Balkans region and Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular. The
20-minute film, entitled Honour is in Jihad, features several Bosnian Isis
fighters exhorting their fellow countrymen to join the battle in Syria or carry
out opportunistic attacks on perceived enemies of Islam at home.
“If you can, put
explosives under the cars, in their houses, all over them. If you can, take
poison and put it in their drink or food. Make them die, make them die of
poisoning, kill them wherever you are. In Bosnia, in Serbia, in Sandzak [a region
in south-west Serbia]. You can do it,” one of the Bosnians, identified by a
pseudonym, Salahuddin al-Bosni, implores the audience in Bosnian.
The report, The
Lure of the Syrian War: The Foreign Fighters’ Bosnian Contingent,
found that in 2013 and 2014, 156 Bosnian men and 36 women travelled to Syria,
taking with them 25 children. Out of that number, 48 men and three women had
returned by January of this year.
The authors,
Sarajevo University associate political science professor Vlado Azinović and
Islamic theologian and columnist Muhamed Jusić, found that Bosnia was
ill-equipped to deal with the potential threat. It is a weak state, split by a
1995 peace agreement into two entities, a federation of Muslims (known as Bosniaks)
and Croats, and a Serb republic. Furthermore the federation is divided into 10
cantons. Twenty-two police agencies operate in the country with overlapping
jurisdictions and roles.
“Generally, there is
a lack of coordination between local law-enforcement agencies on [foreign
fighter-] related issues,” the report says, noting there is no single database
on foreign fighters,and the existing data is “mostly scattered, often
incomplete or disorganised”.
“This results in
significant gaps in understanding and monitoring of the phenomenon,” it notes,
adding that government “lacks a discernible strategy” to confront the looming
problem.
“We are not doing
anything. We are just observing,” Azinović said.
Kristina Jozić, a
spokeswoman for the Bosnian state investigation and protection agency (Sipa),
responsible for internal security, said it would analyse the Isis video with a
view to identifying Bosnians involved in criminal offences.
“The return of
individuals participating in the armed conflict in Syria, fighting with Isis,
is undoubtedly a security challenge and a threat, the extent of which is hard
to determine at this time,” Jozić said. “Sipa constantly checks allegations of
terrorist activities, whether it be on trips to foreign battlefields, financing,
recruitment or other terror-related activities ... and will take the necessary
action.”
Salafist communities operating outside the
official mosques have sprung up in three districts, Gornja Maoča, Osve and
Dubnica, and “pop-up” radical mosques, often funded from the Gulf, have
appeared in Sarajevo, Zenica and Tuzla.
After three years of
observing Bosnian jihadis, the authors place them in two broad categories:
veterans who fought alongside mujahideen volunteers from the Arab world in the
1992-1995 Bosnian conflict, and young Bosnian men “driven mostly by adrenaline
and a quest for self-validation, self-respect, group belonging, and purpose”.
Almost a third of the Bosnian Isis recruits had criminal records.
Chronic deadlock
between the rival entities has contributed to economic stagnation and a 63%
unemployment rate among young Bosnians, the highest official rate in the world.
Bosnian society, which the report says “is gradually losing the ability to
manage itself”, is becoming a factor in the flow of Isis recruits.
Like most Isis
videos, Honour is in Jihad supplies slickly edited, emotive images married to a
seductive narrative. It paints an idyllic picture of insurgent life in Syria,
with Bosnian, Kosovan and Albanian fighters walking off to battle like a
smiling band of brothers while enjoying time with their families on their days
off, complete with complimentary cars.
Isis has produced a
stream of similar videos aimed at recruits from France, Somalia, Yemen, Libya
and several other countries, each one tailored to local culture and history.
With the use of
computer graphics, the film portrays the sweep of Balkan history as a prolonged
expropriation of inherently “Muslim lands”, first by “crusaders”, then
atheistic communists, and finally nationalists. The current Bosniak political
leadership are painted as collaborators with the enemies of Islam “preparing
you like sheep for the next genocide”.
“The massacres will
be repeated if Muslims don’t return to your religion,” an elderly jihadi, Abu
Safiyah al-Bosni, declares in the film. He is believed to be a Muslim from
Sandzak rcalled Abid Podbićanin, and was reported killed in Syria in March.
Salahuddin al-Bosni,
who issued the calls for murder earlier in the video and is thought to be a
Bosnian called Ines Midzic, apparently died in battle at about the same time.
The Bosnian authorities believe another two participants in the film are also
dead; another is seriously wounded.
Western government
officials believe that the roughly 50 jihadis who have come back to Bosnia so
far represent a manageable load for the Bosnian intelligence and security
agencies, despite their many divisions and flaws. But they also worry that the
scale of the problem could escalate dramatically given the parlous conditions
of Bosnia’s economy and society.
In the only
potential terrorist incident to cause casualties in Bosnia this year, a
24-year-old Bosniak man from the area around the Serb-run town of Zvornik,
drove to its police station on April 27 and opened fire, killing one officer
and injuring two others before being shot dead himself.
The gunman, Nerdin
Ibrić, was found to have been a friend of a local man who had returned from
Syria, but the extent to which he had come under jihadi influence is unclear.
Official reports said Ibrić shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he launched his attack,
but other accounts said he hurled curses at his targets. It also turned out
that Ibrić’s father was among 750 Muslim men rounded up by Serb police and
paramilitaries in June 1992, at the start of the war, and killed.
The nationalist Serb
authorities reacted as if the shooting had been a major offensive. “This is the
worst terrorism attack that could happen in the Serb Republic,” Dragan Lukač,
the region’s interior minister, told local television, adding that it “could be
the start of much worse events in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
The Serb leadership
used the shooting as a pretext for arresting large numbers of Bosniaks on their
territory, and claimed it justified the creation of a new Serb special police
squad. Western diplomats argued it was a reason for better coordination among
the existing 22 police forces rather than for creating a new one.
